Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and designer. Among the most famous of her many novels are The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so. In 2007 NYRB Classics published a collection of her short stories, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton.
It's this alertness to the terror of being a stranger in one's own house, in one's own self, that makes Wharton such a fine and frightening writer of ghost stories. --Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books These ghost stories are not mere genre, not chills and thrills. They are about the liberty of the form itself. . . . I believe that these macabre stories were, for Edith Wharton, another way out, another departure and yet another entry into the penetrating observations on the destructive powers of human possession, the aftermath of dispossession and the haunting power of love. --Maureen Howard A blend of Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James, [Wharton] has a lightness of touch that belies the often very grisly tale. --Kate Mosse, The Guardian Mysterious and coolly menacing stories of the supernatural. --Dan Chaon, The Week